The United Nations University is an autonomous academic
organization under the United Nations umbrella, with headquarters
in Tokyo. According to its charter, the University's mandate is
to carry out research, postgraduate education, and dissemination
of knowledge related to the pressing global problems facing
mankind. It has also a specific mandate towards capacity building
in the developing countries to assist them in dealing with the
questions of development. An international community of scholars,
the United Nations University works through networks of
scientists from each of the world's continents. These networks
serve to focus the issues to be researched and to bring together
the brightest minds to cooperate in finding solutions to the
international problems.

The purpose of the UNU Global Environmental Forum series is to
disseminate research results on issues pertaining to global
environmental change to a broader public. Since the beginning of
the series in 1991, the Fora have covered a wide variety of
issues. The first one, entitled "Monitoring and Action for
the Earth," was concerned with new technologies for
monitoring and observation of the changes occurring in the
terrestrial and oceanic ecosystems. The second Forum, in 1993,
focused on environmental change affecting rainforests and
drylands in South-East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Chinese
drylands. The third Forum's title was posed in the form of a
question: "Will Tropical Forests Change in a Global
Greenhouse?" It examined the complex and multi-faceted
interlinkages between global warming and the sustainability of
tropical rainforest ecosystems and their biological diversity.

The fourth UNU Global Environmental Forum took place in Osaka,
Japan, on 25 May 1995. Its theme was "Population, Land
Management, and Environmental Change." The Forum focused on
the research carried out under the University's international
collaborative research programme with the same title. This
publication reproduces the papers presented at the Forum in an
edited form. The first three papers set the objectives of the
research programme (Harold Brookfield) and outline some of the
underlying key concepts, including farmers' participation
(Michael Stocking) and the role of women (Janet Momsen). The
following four chapters highlight preliminary results from the
research undertaken within the field research clusters of the
programme in Papua New Guinea (Graham Sem and Ryutaro Ohtsuka),
northern Thailand (Kanok Rerkasem), and the Amazon (Christine
Padoch). The final chapter by Shunji Murai presents a different
perspective to the population carrying capacity at the global
level.

The Forum was organized jointly with the International
Environmental Technology Centre of the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP/ IETC), and in cooperation with the Global
Environmental Centre Foundation. The Forum, as well as all the
earlier ones, was sponsored by Obayashi Corporation.